


Understanding That You've Understood

by OracleGlass



Category: Bourne (Movies), Bourne Legacy (2012), Bourne Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-14
Updated: 2012-09-14
Packaged: 2017-11-14 04:51:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OracleGlass/pseuds/OracleGlass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But there are moments, and she's been watching.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Understanding That You've Understood

It takes her some time to notice, being as how she’s new to this “running for your life” thing. Ever since he found her huddled in the corner of her own house, there’ve been precious few moments to stop and reflect on the man she’s been thrown together with so abruptly. It was hours into the long flight before she stopped bracing against an air marshal’s hand on her shoulder; when she finally relaxed, she fell asleep like she had been sedated. She woke crook-necked and sticky-eyed to see Aaron pacing slowly past her in the aisle, his face neutral, the slightest tick upwards of an eyebrow her only indication that things are fine. Still, the sense that he’s watching over her allows her to slip back into a drowse, the airplane noise humming in her ears.

Then there was an endless night in the dense, wet heat of Manila, watching Aaron groan on a bed, his noises barely audible against the backdrop of a whirring fan and a noisy street. This time, she’s the lookout, attempting to protect him against an invisible enemy. She has all night to wonder if she’s about to lose the one stable point that had surfaced in the chaos, while she sponges his forehead and talks him through episodes of wild thrashing. Not much time at all to know this man. Hardly any time.

But there have been moments, and she’s been watching, her instincts always to parse information. She’s begun to see response patterns, started learning some of his psych. Not her specialty, but everyone in the program had at least a smattering of knowledge about behavior. No matter how focused you were on what you could see through the microscope, you still needed to be able to see how it played out in the field. Although as Aaron pointed out, it hadn’t stopped her from thinking of him as a number she was charting.

She winces at the direction her thoughts take her, her brain abruptly presenting her with a slideshow of Donald, a gun, blood spraying over sterile white surfaces. Pause. Breathe.

The sun is hot, sending trickles of sweat down her neck. She stretches and looks over her shoulder, to where Aaron is rewiring a new something-or-other into the ship’s radio. Marlon, the captain’s young son, is watching intently, and he explains the why and the wherefore and promises that the next time it breaks, it’ll be Marlon’s turn to fix it. The boy hangs on every word.

So. Who is Aaron? The man who has saved her life multiple times. The man who she has saved. A number in a chart. An arm under her needle. A spy. A killer. An ally. She has made him very good at it. Gave him the brains, the reflexes.

Anomalies. Time and again, Aaron’s first act isn’t violence, but a friendly gesture, something genuine. Maybe it’s social engineering they teach them out in the field, a technique to blend in more thoroughly and not arouse suspicion. Or maybe under all the tinkering she’s done (her skin prickles as another bad memory wings by), there’s some innate midwestern charm bubbling to the surface. As defense mechanisms go, it’s charming. And if sometimes his eyes seem opaque, and she’s wondering what that brain of his is crafting, well, how not?

Here’s the truth of it. She mourns her unpublished papers, research she still resents not being able to release into the world. She wants to discuss her findings with other scientists who can understand, exactly, what she and her team accomplished. So much good work. If Donald and a gun are the fruit they all reaped, it does not change the fact that they have also opened new doors for humanity. She looks at Aaron, and remembers Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, and wonders if this sensation of triumph and grief and pride and misery is anything like what he felt. His destruction was large-scale, though; hers is sitting next to her on a boat and has saved her life and watched her on an airplane and made her laugh.

Can Jason Bourne, his wary face glimpsed so briefly on the news, put on the same easy-going facade? Perhaps it’s one all operatives are skilled at maintaining. She can’t imagine their pursuer from Manila attempting it, making jokes, being social. She’s already dreamed about him a few times, a faceless shadow pursuing. Aaron laughs with the crew, can speak passable Tagalog now, helps with the grunt labor on board without being asked. If it is an act, it’s good enough that she sees no cracks. By the time they’re on the boat together she realizes she trusts him implicitly, even if she’s not sure she should.  
*****

Aaron unfolds himself slowly, chatting over chores or during slow times as Danilo’s boat chugs through the little seas that divide the thousands of islands of the Philippines. He’s strangely open, but she doesn’t want to interrogate him, or bring about any return to their old life of scientist and subject, so she lets him lead. One afternoon, he brings up his childhood, the time in the state home.

“Had to fight to keep my things, or the bigger kids would have taken them,” he says casually while they clean fish, passing them over to Marlon, who is frying them for the crew’s lunch. The sound of grease spattering is barely audible over the noisy engine.

“At some point I figured out that I could give them something before they thought about taking it, and that seemed to change things. Hand them the comic book I swiped from the Ben Franklin, and they’d give it back to me when they were done with it. Very biblical, turning enemies to friends, except I don’t think they had stolen candy bars in mind when that got written down. Weird, really. A lot of bullies would take it as a sign of weakness, but it worked.”

“That’s very intuitive,” Marta says, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, so she doesn’t get fish scales in her eyes. “You assessed your environment and came up with a strategy to improve it.”

“Hell. Intuition is about all I had to work with, then. Instinct. Just like any other dumb animal.”

******

Recruiter had to cheat my IQ score...raised it by 12 points so they’d take me...

She’s always been the brain. It was expected, in her family, with a mother who wrote prize-winning plays, with a violinist father who performed around the world. Her departure into the sciences and not the arts had startled them, but they were unsurprised by her trajectory to the higher reaches of her field. Maybe not the disappearing into the shadowy depths of a government lab, but then, these things take even the most prepared of people a little unawares. She wasn’t even sure how it had happened, and it had been her hand signing the paperwork.

Mom was dead these five years now, and dad not long after her. Their deaths had unmoored her a bit, all that loss all at once. Long hours at the job, longer hours at the diviest bars she could manage. Driving drunk (the newspapers had certainly made hay of that). Finding the absolute worst choice and then seeing if she could top herself. Letting all her ambitious plans for her money pit of a house’s renovation fall by the wayside, leaving her to camp out in its few habitable rooms. She was just starting to get it together, just pulling out of the nosedive when Donald came hunting them all through the lab, when a psychiatrist tried to shoot her in the head.

And then she took a lighter from Aaron’s hand and set everything ablaze.

Twelve IQ points before the military would take him.

Jesus.

*****

She’s not shy about it - she’d gladly tumble into bed (or bunk, as the case may be, narrow but not, she judges, unmanageable) with him. He’d be the best choice in men she’d made since her heartfelt crush on a pianist who worked with her father, a lanky Czechoslovakian who had the tact and patience to gently deflect a lovelorn teenager. She had lifted her head out of her chemistry textbooks and been smitten, following him around like a second shadow. It’s funny how she stopped looking for kindness in her partners after that, especially after her parents died. Indifference was so much easier to manage. She’s starting to see the benefits of kindness now. She also has more patience

So she flirts with Aaron, who flirts easily back, but keeps his distance. They spend their time discussing the future, but not too seriously. As anonymous bits bobbing on the ocean, this is as safe a location as any if there are still pursuers. Aaron talks a little bit about his past, not much. She doesn’t press. One night he tells a story of a snowy hut, a bunk, a name carved into the wood with a knife. They sit side by side, arms draped over the railing and dangling their feet over the water, creating phosphorescent trails, and he talks about how he had already started to worry about his place in the program, how he had been sent into the snowy wilderness to get his head back on straight.

“They want you completely committed,” he says, his smile wry. “Outside distractions forbidden, you’re completely given over to what you’re told is the greater good. If you’re in the military it’s a good chance you’re already at least a little sold on the idea of a mission. After that, it just takes some...fine tuning.”

“Do you think any of the others got away?”

“I’d bet you any amount of money there are some out there who slipped the net.” He stares outwards, a tiny muscle bunched at the corner of his mouth. “But not many of them. Poor stupid bastards, all of us. Well, not stupid. You docs saw to that.”

“Aaron,” she says, and her voice cracks, ever so slightly. He turns to her and for a moment, the lantern hanging behind him illuminates a face of stone. Her heart pounds in her ears. But whatever expression she has on her face softens his and he stretches out his hand to hers and intertwines their fingers. He lifts her fingers to his mouth and kisses her knuckles, and something breaks, she starts to try and stammer an explanation, a justification, something, anything. The topic they’ve been avoiding so carefully, all spilling out of her in an awkward tangle.

He stops her with a time-honored tactic. His arm goes around her waist and she finds herself being drawn tightly against his body, and his mouth comes down on hers. There’s no place to put her own arms but around his neck, so she does, her hands clasped around her own forearms. At first, it’s the barest brush of lips, nothing insistent, but her response must be encouraging because the kiss lengthens, grows more demanding. One hand catches the back of her neck, and he takes his time, exploring her mouth thoroughly. He pulls away, but not much, so he can look at her face, and she returns the favor, surveying the square farmboy features she’s come to know better than her own.

“C’mon, doc,” he says, his voice affectionate. “We’ve got places to be.”

He helps her up, laughing at her as she staggers momentarily - the kiss has been long enough that her feet have gone to sleep - and totes her back to their bunk. Pushing her back into the tangle of blankets, he strips off her shirt, his thumbs rubbing cleverly over her hard nipples, his mouth following to blaze trails over her stomach and breasts.

She wriggles underneath him, her hands up under his shirt, tracing every line of muscle she can reach, naming them in a murmur against his neck, “...internal oblique, external oblique, transversus abdominis, latissimus dorsi...really, Aaron, you could pose for one of those anatomy models...oh my god, don’t stop whatever you’re doing...”

He stifles a burst of laughter against her neck, and when she pulls his hair in retaliation he nips her, then kisses his way up her jawline to her ear. Her legs are wrapped around his waist and the feeling of his hardness against her, through his thin cotton pants, turns her voice languid and throaty.

“Don’t you dare stop, Aaron...” her voice trails off as one of his hands finds its way up her leg, her light skirt posing very little impediment. Turns out all that manual dexterity he possesses is very useful when it comes to peeling panties off women, and she tells him so, in between more frantic kissing. He slides one finger inside her as his tongue slides into her mouth, and she smothers a cry against his neck, whimpering softly. The boat’s small, and the water carries sound. She’s in no mood for an audience. She almost loses control as the heel of his hand presses downwards in slow circles, and he knows how close she came to screaming, judging by his smug expression. Well, turn about. A few deft fumbles and she’s got his pants half-undone and her fingers wrapped around the hot hard length of him. He lies back with eyes closed and his lower lip between his teeth, as and lets her tease him as deliciously as she knows how, stroking up and down, watching his expression change, his lips part, as she finds the perfect rhythm.

“God, Doc...fuck...” His voice is tense, his teeth gritted.

“We can’t, unless you can conjure a condom. And if you could manage that in the middle of the ocean in a devoutly Catholic country...” her voice trails off as he reaches inside his pillow and pulls out a foil packet, wiggling it at her.

“Secret agent, sweetheart. We’re resourceful.”

“You’re a magician, that’s what you are.”

“Oh, honey. We’re only just getting started.” The foil tears easily, and in another second she’s once again spread back against the blankets as he slides into her. It’s so good, so right, her legs around his waist urging him into her, harder, faster, his arms to either side of her face so she can see only him, his face, his mouth, his eyes, just him. Her nails rake down his back and he hisses but his pace doesn’t falter, continues driving into her as she arches up to meet him. They’re one creature with the same heartbeat. She gasps, says “fuck fuck fuck” and comes, feeling it break over her like a warm rush of water, and he follows her down, hips pumping, his mouth shaping her name. They fall in a tangled heap, the breeze drying the sweat from their skin.

*****

“I hoped we were lost,” she had said, in that first flush of exhilaration after they’d made their escape. She’s ready to rip up every map, throw the compass overboard. As she begins to drowse, she stretches out her hand and finds his, already reaching out for hers.

**Author's Note:**

> This story had stalled dead in the water, but anuna_81 gave me the use of her eyeballs, her enthusiasm and an ear to ramble into so I could pull it together. Many thanks to her and to the whole enthusiastic fandom.
> 
> Title from Band of Skulls.
> 
> Oppenheimer famously quoted, "I have become Death, destroyer of worlds."


End file.
